Entities

Editions

Hans Hartung

30 Aug — 20 Oct 2019 at Perrotin Shanghai in Shanghai, China

17 September 2019

Hans Hartung. Courtesy of Perrotin Shanghai

Perrotin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Hans Hartung in Shanghai,
his first in mainland China since his solo show in 2005 at National Art
Museum in China, NAMOC Beijing, and at the National Museum in Nankin.
The exhibition is held concurrent with his retrospective at the Musée
d’Art Moderne de Paris (October 11, 2019 – March 8, 2020, curated
by Odile Burluraux), which will present the various phases of his artistic
production and the great diversity and consistency of his pictorial
language. The exhibition follows a major exhibition at Perrotin New
York in early 2018 (curated by Matthieu Poirier) which spanned seven
decades of Hartung’s career from his first abstract works in 1922
through 1989, the year of his passing.

Since his first exhibition in 1931, Hans Hartung (1904-1989) paved the
way for generations of artists across modern and contemporary art.
His experiments in painting truly marked the 20th Century, pushing the
boundaries of the form.

“At once German and French, exalted and rational, fascinated at an early
age by the expressionist brutality of the woodcuts by Die Brücke, but also
by the classifying distance of Paul Klee and the formal clarity of Henri Matisse, Hartung in a sense refused to choose between two simplistic
visions of abstract art: on one side, eruptive and chaotic painting, based
on purportedly ‘pure’ intuition, combined with the expressionist, gestural,
lyrical, informal, and Tachiste tendencies of postwar painting; and, on the
other, control, precision, and systems, notions that belong more to the realm
of geometric abstraction.”

Ranging from 1950s through the 1980s, the paintings that will be on view
at Perrotin Shanghai reveal the power, depth, and complexity of the artist’s
work. The exhibition traces 3 specific days of work at his studio from 1973,
1986, and 1989. By displaying diverse works produced on the same day,
visitors are able to understand the drastic shifts in technique, tools, scale,
and gesture in the artist’s practice.

These three bodies of work show the artist’s rich and constant explorations
during all his career. Hartung’s control and masterful display of painterly
effects were remarkable throughout his life, however it was not until the last
decade of his life that some of his freest and most experimental works were
produced.

In the last decade of his life, Hartung expanded on the range of techniques
he employed in his work by introducing new and unexpected tools into his
practice. Beginning in 1979, the artist began to use branches from the olive
trees surrounding his studio in lieu of a paint brush. Dipping the branches
into vinyl paint, Hartung would whip his canvases with such intensity
that they often had to be placed on wooden supports in order to prevent
damage. Marking a new direction in the artist’s work, Hartung produced
some of his most energetic and dynamic paintings during this time.
Hartung continued to replace the big brushes he had been using with
experimental tools and devices, including paint sprayers. By 1986, the
artist introduced a new mechanism into his already extensive armory of
implements known as a ‘sulfateuse’. Hartung had been using spray paint in
his work since the 1960s, however, this earlier method of air spray not only
required lifting heavy canisters, but also left a clearly mechanical application
of paint.

The artist, who had suffered two strokes that left him physically
incapacitated, embraced the new tool which entitled him to project great
sweeping lines of paint with a simple flick of his wrist, combining interlacing
lines with sometimes textured patches of color with varying degrees of density. From 1986 to 1989, fine mists, thick ‘clouds’, paint runs, and freely
doodled lines became the formal language of the artist.

The exhibition also includes two inks on paper dating from the 1950s.
Spanning 4 working decades, this presentation will allow Shanghai visitors
to better understand the continuously constructed and renewed work of
Hartung. An indefatigable worker, in constant search of new experiments,
Hartung literally renews his work, starting from the sixties, by the use of a
large panoply of tools.